Brace for Impacthttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com
Applying the principles of the book Brace for Impact to the news of the day
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https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/this-blog-is-no-longer-inactive/#respondSat, 13 Nov 2010 11:51:43 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=267Please join me at

A Chronicle of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/this-blog-is-no-longer-inactive/feed/0talewisGenetic Defects Increasingly Apparenthttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/259/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/259/#commentsMon, 14 Jun 2010 11:54:20 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=259I have taken a certain amount of flack for presuming to argue, in Brace for Impact, that genetic engineering has not been a success, that it indeed cannot be a success, and presents terrifying dangers to the web of life and to human well- being. So it is gratifying to have the New York Times confirm many of my arguments.

In the book I argued that the mis-named practice of genetic “engineering” has nothing to do with precise manipulation of genes, but is in fact a crap shoot in which scientists create new viruses and loose them on cells to see what happens. Once in a while, in the manner of a roomful of monkeys at keyboards, something meaningful results, such as a tomato with a fish gene that allows it to tolerate cold. For this we risk the escape into the world of a mutant organism of unknown capabilities.

Millions of dollars in advertising, bought by corporations that enjoy billions in revenues and research grants because of their genetic ambitions and pretenses, convince us that someone, somewhere, sometime soon, is or will be enjoying the fruits of this ultra-modern technology. Yet there is no objective evidence that this is so.

The much touted Green Revolution in agriculture (whose name, properly understood, refers to the color of money, not of growing things) has replaced traditional, sustainable agriculture with genetically modified seeds requiring chemically and mechanically intensive — above all, expensive — methods that, it was promised, would feed the world. They have, to the contrary, impoverished much of the world and endangered the rest by depressing yields, raising the cost of production and destroying the soils, water and air required for the enterprise to continue.

Unabashed by their failures and unrestrained in their promises of future success, the genetic manipulators moved on from ravaged plants to humans, where the prospects for profits and appalling mistakes were much brighter. The massively expensive “human genome project” ($3 billion is an estimate) set out to map the human genetic code, all three billion genes. Success was declared — albeit a weirdly limited, even truncated success in which most of the genes were not, in fact, “mapped” and most of those identified were labelled as “junk” with no known function — at a presidential news conference in 2000.

It was your standard, technology-is-omnipotent, welcome-to-the-21st-Century songfest. In ten years, said President Bill Clinton, echoing the triumphant gene mappers, the knowledge gained would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”

Ten years have passed since that bit of hubris was expressed. And, as the New York Times reported yesterday with an elegant phrase, results remain “largely elusive.”

By which the paper meant intended results. For example, a study of 101 genetic “predictors” of heart disease, in 10,000 women over 12 years, found that the predictors predicted nothing at all.

What has been clearly demonstrated, and is being steadfastly ignored by all the people whose livelihood depends on the funding of strangers, is that the further technology pushes into the codes of life, the further the horizon of comprehension recedes. Having an incomplete and largely speculative map of Africa, it turns out, is not helpful to the enterprise of crossing Africa on foot.

As I reported in Brace for Impact, a participant in the human genome project recalled afterward that they had thought that to transcribe the alphabet of the genome would be to understand it. Instead, it merely allowed them to hear snippets of a marvelously complex, subtle and varied language that is far beyond their comprehension. Where it will remain.

It is one thing to learn what we can of these marvelous and mysterious processes. It is quite another to presume to take them under our management for profit when both our ignorance, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of that ignorance, are huge.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/259/feed/2talewisRisky Business: Another Well Blowshttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/risky-business-another-well-blows/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/risky-business-another-well-blows/#commentsMon, 07 Jun 2010 14:26:23 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=256Little noticed in the shadow of the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil eruption, the blowout of a natural-gas well in Pennsylvania last Thursday — after the failure of its blowout preventer — spewed gas and toxic chemicals for 16 hours before being brought under control. A single spark near the scene could have turned the event into a headline-grabbing conflagration that would have brought unwelcome attention to another unfamiliar new technology being used to get at previously inaccessible gas deposits.

Publicized or not, the incident in Pennsylvania — in Clearfield County, about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburg — begged comparison with the Gulf oil disaster. Just as deepwater drillers are pushing the limits of technological capability in an increasingly desperate fight to maintain oil supplies in the face of inevitable depletion, so gas drillers in the eastern United States, from Texas to New York, are using increasingly dangerous methods to get at the last bubbles of natural gas.

The cutting edge of the struggle now is a process called hydraulic fracturing, which involves the injection of millions of gallons of water, sand and toxic chemicals under enormous pressure into shale formations deep underground. The fluids fracture the shale with explosive force, releasing trapped gas and forcing it to the future. Occasionally the fluids release gas that is under high pressure, as happened in Pennsylvania, and the result is a very dangerous blowout.

The mortal hazard for the operators is fire, as the world saw when the Deepwater Horizon blew up and burned. Extreme good luck kept the Pennsylvania gas plume, which erupted to heights of 75 feet, from igniting during the 16 hours it took to bring the well under control.

The prime environmental hazard is the fluid used by the drillers to fracture the shale. The contents are a closely guarded trade secret, but the secrecy is breaking down as it is found in more and more water wells near the so-called “fracking” operations. Investigators suspect the industry is deploying about 300 chemicals, of which 65 are known hazards to human health. These reportedly include such poisons as ethylene glycol, otherwise known as antifreeze, benzene and fluoride (which in tiny doses prevents tooth decay, but in slightly larger doses destroys bone).

In the latest Pennsylvania blowout, an estimated 1.5 million gallons of the fluid was discharged onto the surface. Oddly, its presence on the surface is recognized as an environmental disaster, while its injection underground, where it inevitably wanders into freshwater aquifers, is considered routine.

Another hazard to groundwater is the gas itself, which gets pushed around in directions and into places that are completely unpredictable, as the operators are even more blind to conditions they are manipulating than the Deepwater Horizon engineers, who at least could deploy robot submarines. In Dimock, Pennsylania (in the northeastern corner of the state) last year, 13 private wells were contaminated with methane (the gas) when a fracking operation began. One of the water wells exploded. There are hundreds of reports of impaired or polluted groundwater associated with fracking in Alabama, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The world’s available supply of petroleum is shrinking while demand for it is increasing. The struggle to avoid the unavoidable implications of this reality is becoming more dangerous as it becomes more desperate.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/risky-business-another-well-blows/feed/1talewisSigns and Portents Ignoredhttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/signs-and-portents-ignored/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/signs-and-portents-ignored/#respondFri, 04 Jun 2010 13:46:32 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=245The more things change, etc. Now in the aftermath of the Gusher in the Gulf (more delicately branded as the “Gulf Oil Spill,” as if it were more like a teacup knocked askew than an ocean destroyed) the people who did it, and the people whose job it was to prevent it — the same people who previously told everyone that it could not happen — are shrugging their shoulders, rolling their eyes and saying, “Who knew?”

the BP engineers who warned the company, a year ago, that the casing they were using for the well was dangerously thin and could rupture, and that it violated the company’s design standards and safety policies;

the BP managers who told federal officials in March that they were in danger of losing control of the well in the face of sudden gas eruptions, losses of drilling mud and other mishaps;

the BP engineers who warned in writing in April that the crew on Deepwater Horizon would not be able to seal the well successfully. Their memo was revised to say, in a second edition, that it would be “possible” to do so;

the writers of at least three internal memos reporting that the blowout preventer, the last ditch of defense against losing control of the well, was leaking the hydraulic fluid that made it work;

the operators who complained repeatedly in April that they were encountering blockages in the well casing that should not have been there;

and the operators who on the day of the blowout, according to survivors, were getting erratic pressure readings that indicated something was seriously wrong deep in the well.

And yet, a senior BP drilling engineer, Mark E. Hafle, told an investigating panel after the disaster that “nobody believed there was going to be a safety issue.”

In a recent edition of PBS’s Frontline examining airline safety, titled “Flying Cheap,” correspondent Miles O’Brien (who is an experienced pilot) pointed out that airline crashes rarely occur without the prior appearance of multiple warning signs giving companies and regulators the opportunity to avert the disaster. One example cited in the program was ValuJet Flight 592, which crashed in the Florida Everglades in May of 1996, killing all 110 people aboard. Mary Schiavo, at the time Inspector General for the Department of Transportation, remembered that red flags has started going up a year earlier, after a non-fatal accident involving ValuJet.

What inspectors found appalled Schiavo. “We found things like duct tape on the planes, cracked windshields and windows, violations on minimum equipment lists — things that you must carry to have a safe flight. We found all these violations.”Before the fatal crash. Neither the company nor the regulators did anything, and after the crash of 592 — immediately after, as Schiavo ruefully recalled for Frontline — “The secretary of transportation flew down to Miami and stood in the Everglades — literally on the watery grave of 110 people — and said, ‘ValuJet is a safe airline.’ He had no way of knowing that. And he had a lot of clues that it wasn’t.”

Of course it sounds familiar. Whether it’s Katrina, Flight 592, the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon, the politico-industrial complex claims to be operating with perfect safety, then claims total surprise when something terrible happens, then swears that no one did anything wrong, and finally, when the scope of the catastrophe is no longer avoidable, promises to change everything.

Then it’s back to business as usual. That is, of course, until close of business — due to circumstances that were, as will later become clear, entirely within our control..

Bananas. Banana wilt disease continues to decimate the staple crop of East Africa, ravaging the plant relied upon by large populations in Uganda, Rwanda, western Kenya and Bukoba in north-western Tanzania. The disease, which is on a rampage because of the global industry’s insistence on using a single strain of banana (the Cavendish), is adding its threat to food security in a region where severe drought has reduced the production of maize, beans and milk. Banana producers in Central and South America, who supply a large portion of the American market, live in terror of the new strain of wilt finding its way there, because it is resistant to the chemicals they have used to control it in the past. Thus two methods used by industrial agriculture to maximize the production of bananas — monoculture and chemical control of pests and diseases — are the prime causes of a mortal threat to all banana production.

Casava. Agriculture officials and researchers in Uganda are warning of a serious threat posed by a new strain of cassava brown streak disease, saying it could wipe out the entire crop. Mike Thresh, a consultant on cassava viral diseases, said the disease was now occurring in areas previously believed to be immune, such as high altitude areas away from the Indian Ocean coastal belt of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. It is considered a threat to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, where the crop is a major factor in food security.

Corn, soybeans. Farmers in the American breadbasket are fighting a plague of weeds that have evolved resistance to the weedkiller Roundup. A polyphosphate herbicide that kills all plants, but then quickly breaks down into inert compounds, Roundup was promoted by Monsanto as the basis for an entirely new approach to agriculture. Monsanto scientists altered the genes of corn, soybean and other staple crops so that they would resist Roundup, which could then be used instead of earlier, more toxic and persistent chemicals, to kill everything else. But as always happenes when industrial agriculture tries to kill everything else and grow one thing, “everything else” rapidly evolves its own resistance, which has now happened all over the world where Roundup has been extensivley used. The results: crops are requiring heavier and heavier applications of the pricey Roundup, plus additional applications of the old bad actors like 2-4,D and a return to expensive, intensive tillage.

Rice. The so-called “Green Revolution” — the use of genetically manipulated seed, synthetic fertilizers and intense chemical applications to try to increase production — has been such a stunning failure in the rice- and cotton-bowl of India that more than 200,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997, and in one state alone — Punjab — they continue at the steady rate of one per day. The primary issue is the high cost of the GM seeds, available only from the global chemical and seed companies such as Monsanto. Plants grown from them do not produce viable seed, so instead of harvesting their own seed for free, as they have done for centuries, the farmers now have to buy it every year. It was supposed to be worth it because the yields would be higher, but they are not, and when the farmers cannot pay their debts, or cannot buy seed, many of them kill themselves.

All of these developments are consistent with a central theme of my book (Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living): that achieving economies of scale in industrial enterprises, including agriculture, simultaneously concentrates risks that may not be realized at the same time as the gains from the efficiencies, but will eventually more than countervail them. After decades during which these risks were well concealed, they are now manifesting around the world, with ominous implications for food security and political stability.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/threats-to-the-worlds-food-supply-proliferate/feed/2talewisThe Seven Greatest Myths About the Gulf Oil Spillhttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/the-seven-greatest-myths-about-the-gulf-oil-spill/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/the-seven-greatest-myths-about-the-gulf-oil-spill/#respondFri, 28 May 2010 19:08:00 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=236It’s a Spill. The word spill means that a portion of a finite amount of stuff in a container is inadvertently transferred to another surface. But in the Gulf, toxic oil from a deposit so large its volume cannot even be estimated is erupting into the water column a mile below the surface at a rate so large it has not yet been authoritatively estimated. If this is a spill, then the eruption of Mt. St. Helens was a burp.

It’s About Wildlife. Yes, it is too bad about the storks, gulls, turtles, whales and so forth that are getting slimed, and about the threatened species that are about to be pushed over the edge into extinction by the rampaging oil. But if you remember the old saw about the canary in the coal mine, in which the absence of breathable air affected the canary first, remember this: the miners did not thereupon haul ass out of the coal mine in order to save the canaries, but to save their own aforementioned rear ends. Same in the Gulf. The threat does not consist of a threat to wildlife, but is illustrated by what happens to the wildlife. The threat is to the continued existence of an enormous ecosystem that provides a large portion of our food, and whose crash could bring down other ecosystems. We have met the endangered species, and it is us.

It’s About Energy Independence. It’s a terrible thing, this mantra goes, but it’s the price we have to pay for energy independence. Since a) we don’t have energy independence, b) there is no indication that we will ever have energy independence and c) no one, anywhere, has proposed a plan for getting energy independence, it is hard to imagine what it is that makes this price necessary. We consume 21 million barrels of oil a day, of which we produce eight million, 1.7 million from the Gulf of Mexico. So tell me again: the Gulf oil moves us toward energy independence how?

It’s About Government Failure. To the screamers, it’s always simple. “The government should have taken command immediately after the accident,” and “the government should go in there and kick BP out of the way and take control.” Left out of the chants, perhaps to avoid cluttering up the meter, is the answer to the question: “and then do what?” Where does the government find people who know how to control a blowout a mile under water? Answer: nowhere, because it’s never happened before. Who has the best and perhaps only chance of dealing with this (other than Glen Beck, of course, who is otherwise engaged)? Maybe deepwater-oil people? What, you say, the same people who caused the problem? Look at it this way: If your brain surgeon makes a mistake, and someone has to go back in to fix it, are you going to rule out brain surgeons because they caused the problem?

It’s Just an Accident. Stuff happens, they say. Whaddayagonnadoo? When people drink and drive they sometimes kill people, get arrested, and plead to the judge that it was just an accident. The people on Deepwater Horizon, according to reports, ignored screwy pressure readings from the well, a dead battery in a blowout-preventer control panel, and leaky hydraulic hoses on the blowout-preventer. Then the well blew and the blowout-preventer failed. Honest officer, I only had two beers.

It Never Happened Before. Don’t you love it when you call a company to complain that they sold you a defective product, and they say. “No one has ever complained about that before,” even though you have, several times? Didn’t you love it when, after Katrina, federal officials said no one could have predicted it, only to discover that their own government had conducted drills based on exactly that prediction? Don’t you love it now when BP pleads for understanding because the scope of the disaster is unprecedented, when all kinds of people predicted that if they were allowed to do this, they would screw it up in just this way? Oh, and please answer the question below.

Someone will be “held accountable.” Remember the Exxon Valdez? Forget what you think you remember. A jury awarded those affected by the spill $5 billion dollars in punitive damages. Exxon kept the case in court until the U.S. Supreme Court — just last year, 20 years after the event — reduced the award by 90 per cent. “Held accountable” for damage to public lands and wildlife, estimated at $8 billion, Exxon paid just over ten cents on the dollar. There is no reason to think that BP will be held any more accountable.

[The Supreme Court has recently ruled that for the purposes of influencing political campaigns, corporations are persons with the full protection of the Constitution. So the Court should agree when we propose that the person BP, when proved guilty of causing 11 deaths and untoild devastation to the United States, be taken out and shot.]

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/the-seven-greatest-myths-about-the-gulf-oil-spill/feed/0talewisTroubled Oil on Gulf Watershttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/troubled-oil-on-gulf-waters/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/troubled-oil-on-gulf-waters/#respondThu, 29 Apr 2010 13:41:42 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=230The elegant blonde lady who appears in all the Exxon commercials on TV should now appear with scorched hair, blackened face and wet clothes. It’s the least she could do after years of assuring us that, among other things, to worry about the safety of offshore oil drilling is soooo 1990. With our technology and expertise, the industry murmurs daily, nothing can go wrongongongongong.

It’s been interesting to watch the progression of industry statements during the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, where an explosion aboard an offshore oil rig on April 20 killed 11 people and set the rig ablaze. Industry says: Unfortunate accident, one-in-a-million kind of thing, not to worry, we’ll put the fire out and carry on. We have the technology. What caused the explosion? We don’t have the foggiest, sorry.

Then the oil rig sank, in 5,000 feet of water, on top of the wellhead. Industry says: Unfortunate, one-in-a-million kind of thing, but not to worry, we have the technology in place that shuts off the wellhead should something like this happen, and there will be no significant leakage of oil into the Gulf. Is it in fact leaking now? We don’t have the foggiest, sorry.

Then a leakage of 1,000 barrels of oil a day was discovered. And it was revealed that the shutoff valve on the wellhead, which lies a mile deep, remember, did not have a remote control as other, similar valves do. Which means that robot submarines, the very latest technological sneeze, have to go down and turn the spigot. And this after all is BP, the Beyond Petroleum folks who have recently blown up one of their refineries in Texas, sprung a leak in one of their uninspected, undermaintained pipelines in Alaska, and found themselves unable to finish building another offshore rig, thank goodness.

Industry says: Not to worry, these things happen, we know how to handle this, we have the technology; some floating thingies to surround the slick, some toxic chemicals to dump on it, everything is under control. We’re sending a sub down to turn off the oil and all will soon be well. Anyway, it’s so far off shore that the spilled oil won’t damage the Louisiana coast.

[It’s interesting to note that the news stories of a few days ago, and I’m talking NPR here, not Fox, kept stressing that “environmentalists” were concerned that the oil spill might affect the coast. Curious assumptions: that millions of gallons of crude oil in the waters of the Gulf do no damage until they are on shore; and the only people worried about it are card-carrying, clog-wearing, tree-hugging environmentalists, not real people, like fishermen and shrimpers and oystermen and workers at food processing plants and tourist attractions.]

So today we learn that the oil has been leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels, nearly a quarter million gallons, per day, five times the previous, reluctant industry estimate. The surface slick now measures 100 miles by 45 miles, and there are not enough floating thingies on the planet to surround it. Nor are there enough to protect the Louisiana coast, which is expected to see the first crude wash ashore tomorrow, there are only enough to protect “the most sensitive areas” of the coast, never mind the now-threatened shores of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Please point out on a map, BP, the areas of the coast that unlike the “most sensitive areas” are immune to a coating of crude oil. Ask the people of the south coast of Alaska, if you need assistance.

Now BP, like the Exxon lady, is well aware that in today’s Orwellian, Newspeaking world it is far more important to appear to be doing something than to be doing something. So they and the Coast Guard put on quite a show yesterday, corraling a few thousands of gallons of oil (a tiny fragment of the spill so far) on the surface and setting it afire. What would be left, they said proudly, would not pose a threat to the marine environment. And the plumes of black smoke the size of a small country, what were they, ecologically speaking? Bird feed?

When the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland in 1964, the sight of a river on fire spurred the nation into a paroxysm of environmental protection. The sight of the Gulf of Mexico burning was staged to reassure us. How far we have come.

So as Bill Maher says, New Rules: this Sunday during a break in Meet the Press, the Exxon lady has to stagger out in blackface, her clothes and hair smoking and reeking of oil, to stare blankly at the camera and say, “I don’t know what the *%&*@* happened.”

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/troubled-oil-on-gulf-waters/feed/0talewisLooking for Rage in All the Wrong Placeshttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/looking-for-rage-in-all-the-wrong-places/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/looking-for-rage-in-all-the-wrong-places/#respondWed, 21 Apr 2010 11:50:22 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=224We Americans live in a country engaged in the longest war of its entire history — in Afghanistan — which is now in its ninth year with no end in sight. No military or political leader of our country can explain to us why we are fighting this war, how we are going to win it, or what benefit will accrue if and when we do. (Yes, yes, we understand why we started the war, the question is why are we still fighting it?) When they try, they talk about the central front in the war on terror, a war that has no fronts and has no center. They talk about denying Al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan from which to attack us again, a mission that was accomplished a few weeks into the war (and an argument that could as effectively justify an invasion of Florida). They talk about defeating the Taliban, which has never attacked our country and poses no serious threat to it.

We are borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to fight this war, saddling future generations with an enormous debt. We are killing our young people in the prosecution of this war. We are killing innocent civilians with our excellent weapons, thus engendering hatreds that will last for generations. And yet, almost no one in public life is objecting to this situation, let alone expressing outrage about it.

Instead, people by the hundreds are screaming invective and spewing their anger about being overtaxed. They live in the same country we do, a country that is not only at war, but a country (according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center) whose middle class this year (family of four, median income) paid less than 5 per cent of its income in federal income taxes, a burden that is as light as it has ever been, is in fact the second-lightest in 50 years. Even when you include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare (which are more investments and fees than taxes), the Congressional Budget Office says the entire burden is at its lowest in decades. The effective tax rate for this family has been falling continually since 1980, when it was 12 per cent of income. [Details from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] For this we get outrage and marching in the streets.

More outrage, around tax day (April 15), about a study that found 47% of American households would pay no federal income taxes this year. We might have expected outrage that so many Americans had been pushed into poverty, but that is not what we got. We got anger that these slackers are not paying any taxes, which is not what the study said. These “slackers” — the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the elderly — must still pay sales taxes, property taxes if they still have a home, the aforementioned payroll taxes if they still have a job, car taxes, and so on. But they didn’t make enough to trigger the income tax, for which one outrage-monger (Glen Beck) proposed that they be drafted and made to fight our wars of choice. (Having just escaped the mythical death panels of the health-care legislation, grandma now faces the threat of the draft?)

We live in a country that 18 months ago was brought to its knees, along with much of the rest of the world, by the untrammeled greed of the biggest players in the enormous casino that global “investment banking” has become. People in the millions lost their jobs, their homes, their health and their self-respect as a direct consequence of the Masters of the Universe (thank you, Tom Wolfe) placing huge bets with borrowed money — bets that they, themselves, did not understand. Our country had to borrow trillions of dollars, again to the possible detriment of our grandchildren, to buy more chips for the players so they did not have to leave the tables and check out of their complimentary rooms.

This week we have been told [by the New York Times among others] that just three of the too-big-to-fail gambling houses racked up profits of $11 billion in the first quarter of this year. They made much of this profit by borrowing money from the Federal Reserve at interest rates of about one-half of one per cent, then buying billions of dollars in Treasury bonds yielding three per cent or more. Do you get it? They borrow the money from the government, and lend it back to the government, and make millions and millions of dollars. With which they pay for, among other things, hordes of lobbyists and gazillions in campaign contributions to make sure that the regulations that once prevented this kind of pillage are not revived.

And there is precious little outrage about this. Instead, rowdy demonstrations of gun-toting, “real” Americans claim our country is threatened by an effort to extend access to health care insurance — provided by private, for-profit companies — to the poor and the sick. This offends people who describe themselves as Christian. And is described as too expensive by people who remained cheerfully silent as we spent, so far, over three trillion borrowed dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Long-term cost of the recently passed health-care reform legislation, according to the Congressional Budget Office: less that one-third the outlay required thus far by our two most recent wars of choice, and a long-term reduction in the federal deficit.)

There are reasons good and plenty to be angry about the course of a country whose behavior — its treatment of natural resources, its imperial wars, its fiscal irresponsibility and unlimited greed, among other things — invites the advent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But instead of righteous anger, we get the hissy fits of the rich and famous.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/looking-for-rage-in-all-the-wrong-places/feed/0talewisHomeland Security: Report from the Fronthttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/homeland-security-report-from-the-front/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/homeland-security-report-from-the-front/#respondSat, 10 Apr 2010 11:54:28 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=228It’s hard to pick my favorite part of flying today. I say flying, but when I travel by air today I spend most of my travel time riding: in cars going to and from airports on roads clogged to near-gridlock (but that’s only during rush hour, which now begins at 5 am and usually is over by 3 am); on buses to and from airport parking lots, which these days are often located in nearby, not-necessarily-adjoining states (for example Dulles Airport, near Washington D.C., has its economy parking in Nebraska); on people movers, multi-million-dollar wonders of technology that whisk you around an airport at the speed of — oh, I don’t know, a brisk walk; and on airplanes that instead of flying at 600 miles per hour are sitting at a gate or inching along a taxiway at the speed of the aforementioned people mover. All this non-flying gives me lots of time for quiet reflection, for example on the fact that if I had started from home and had driven toward my destination, I would be there by now (does not apply to most intercontinental flights).

Or maybe the best thing is the feeling of self-confidence you get, when you take off your shoes in the jostle of the line in front of Checkpoint Charlie. This is all because a guy on an airplane tried to set his shoes on fire; when another guy tried to light up his underwear I had nightmares about the new security procedures that would follow, but instead they went with X-ray machines. So for now all you have to put in the tray is your shoes, along with your keys, hat, outer clothing, laptop, wallet, brief case, money, dentures and hairpiece. And then you realize as you shuffle forward like a steer with an appointment in an abattoir, under the steely gaze of the uniformed guards, that you did not, in fact, throw out that sock with the big hole in it, the hole that’s right over your big toe, the toe with the viciously ingrown toenail that has a fungus infection.

Wait, let’s not forget the feeling of togetherness that comes from being wedged and tamped into a big aluminum skin like the contents of a massive sausage, between a former linebacker who’s now a 350-pound beerbacker on one side, and his wife the Cheeto addict on the other, just in front of a colicky 14-month-old (one has been following me around the world for 27 years). Or that pampered feeling when the hatchet-faced flight attendant glares at your pitiful attempt to reach the rest room with a look that clearly says, “Back in your restraints or you’re going to solitary, F-23.”

No, no, I have it. The ultimate moment in the flying experience comes when, in the security line with one foot clamped over the other to hide the hole in your sock, you become aware of a growing, buzzing hive of TSA agents around the screen of the machine behind you, their voices rising in excitement, their eyes ablaze, because they have a violation! And then you realize that they’re looking at your tray. Now that’s a special feeling.

Happened to me the other day. The nature of my predicament had just dawned on me when one of the agents, holding something aloft as if it were a dead rat, strode toward me. He was not a particularly imposing guy, stood somewhere south of five feet nine, but he had the air of Detective Lenny Briscoe at the halfway point of Law and Order, when he says to the perp, “Stand Up!”

“What we have here,” announced the TSA guy to me and the throng nearby, “is a knife!”

As the crowd gasped, I looked blankly at what he was holding. My key ring. It made no sense. I looked back at him, with a little smile, waiting for the punch line. He grew impatient. “A pocket knife!”

Then I got it. On the key ring next to my three-inch-long car key was a two-and-a-half-inch-long gizmo made to look like a tiny Swiss Army knife. It had elfin scissors, a tiny set of tweezers, a toothpick, and, yes, a knife blade, made of the finest Swiss tin, just over two inches long. The thing had gone through airport security unchallenged any number of times. Theoretically, I could cut your throat with it, but you would have to hold very still for me, for about half an hour, while I worked my way laboriously toward your jugular. I could do a better job with my car key.

My smile widened. This was just a little bit of TSA humor. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I joshed.

Then a remarkable thing happened. He did exactly what a puffer fish does when threatened: he inflated himself until he looked like he was seven feet tall and three wide. “I am serious,” he growled, “as a heart attack.”

Now, my policy has alway been to be cautious and quiet when in the presence of people who a) have the authority to confine me to a small room, b) are carrying a gun, or c) are puffed up to three times their normal size. Confronted by all three attributes at once, I cling to my Miranda Rights, as interpreted by Officer Bubba on the old TV series In the Heat of the Night: “You have the right to shut up. If you do not shut up, you could get in deeper than you already in.”

So I stood mutely at attention while Sgt. Puffer outlined my options: go back out and try to find some way to mail the deadly weapon to myself, and probably miss my plane; or go back out and try to get the airline to check the piece, and probably miss my plane. I motioned toward the trash bin with my head. “You want me to throw it away?” I nodded vigorously. He did so, and began to deflate. I waited for permission before shuffling away in my sock feet.

America was a safer place that day, not only because of the men and women in uniform who are Over There fighting for our freedoms, but also because of the men and women in uniform Over Here who are making sure we don’t have many left.

]]>https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/homeland-security-report-from-the-front/feed/0talewisCash and Carry On Governmenthttps://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/cash-and-carry-on-government/
https://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/cash-and-carry-on-government/#respondFri, 05 Mar 2010 17:44:03 +0000http://thomasalewis.wordpress.com/?p=221Health care reform: stalled. Climate change legislation: on hold. Financial industry regulation: fogeddaboudit. Deficit reduction: gedoudahere. California and New York: gridlocked government. Instead of just being critical of the people who got us here and can’t get us out — how easy is that? — how about taking a moment to identify with them? Would that be too much to ask?

Okay, fine, let me put it another way. Until we realize what exactly is going on here, we do not have a prayer of turning it around. We may not have a prayer anyway, but it’s always better to understand what is killing you, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?

Consider, as a prime example, a median case, if you will, what it takes to become and remain a Member of the US House of Representatives. The numbers are a little worse for US Senators, a little less worse for state legislators, but the ratios, and the imperatives, are the same. Forget Republican and Democrat, liberal and democrat, pro-life and anti-life, pro-gun and anti-gun, all the subjects that all the candidates and all the pundits are willing to pretend are what matters. The truth is that nothing matters except the money, and here is why.

If you want to go to Congress and stay there, you are going to have to raise $1.5 million to spend on each campaign, and you’re up every other year. That’s an average, according to the Campaign Finance Institute at George Washington University (I have extrapolated slightly from their detailed figures, which run through 2008). If you have to fight a primary campaign, or if you’re in an urban district, it can be much more. But let’s just focus on the implications of the average number.

Let’s say you win the first time. On the day you take the oath of office, you need to get right back to your office, because on that day you need to raise $2054.79 — on average — toward your next campaign. (Whoops. Can’t do fundraising in your office. Illegal. Riiiiigghht.) That day, and every other day, weekdays and weekends, holidays and vacation days, well days, sick days and mental health days. If you’re in the US Senate, it’s $3652 per day. Every day.

Can you imagine a life in which, setting aside all considerations of paying for the mortgage, the food, the car, the clothes, the education, medical care, savings — on top of all that you had to find someone, every day, to give you two thousand bucks? Imagine it, for just a minute, and then you will understand that these harried congresspeople are spending 90 per cent of their waking time, and probably of their dreaming time as well, doing one thing: begging for money. If they are not at a fundraiser, they are in a meeting planning a fundraiser; if they are not on the phone begging for money, they are doing, or figuring out how to do, something that will make it possible to beg for money, successfully.

So who has their attention? The sick, the poor and the elderly who desperately need access to health care? Or the health care industry, which according to the Washington Post delivered $1.5 million in campaign contributions during just two years to Senator Max Baucus, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and was central to the drafting of health care, um, reform. Do you realize what those contributions represent? 410 days of Senator Baucus’s life, that’s what. What’s your offer, sick people? Note, please, that he’s a Democrat, and remember that this has nothing to do with party. It has to do with money.

There is no time in the lives of these people, nor is there motivation, for them to consider the implications of policy, or the problems of their constituents, or the future of the Republic. They are locked into the fierce urgency of cash by the gold and silver shackles of an era that values nothing but gold and silver.

They have become experts at throwing into the public arena large bones, with shreds of raw meat on them, that distract the dogs of discourse from reality. They’re coming for our guns! They’re going to kill grandma! They’re socialists/ fascists/ stalinists/ fashionistas! They’re killing babies! They’re raising taxes! Especially when the mob has been lashed with a few million dollars’ worth of TV spots, placed discreetly by the industrial handlers (Don’t want Grandma to be executed at age 59? Then tell your congress person….), the ensuing outrage! left-right-left, yin and yang, up and down, keeps everybody entertained for weeks while the ship of state continues to go down at the bow.